Why is Western European music harmonically driven?
I was reading an article where they said that the lute was derived from the oud, a fretless melodic Middle Eastern instrument. But they added frets to the lute in order to make it easier to harmonize multiple notes at the same time, that way it could better integrate with Western European music which was "harmonically-driven".
But it got me wondering what made Western European music based on harmony in the first place. This isn't the first article I've seen that mentioned this. Is it because Europe had instruments such as the harpsichord that had the ability to play multiple notes together. Is that the context that was going on in Europe before the lute hit the scene? Or is there another reason harmony was a big factor in Western Europe?
Edit: on second thought, there were instruments far before the harpsichord like the Lyre that could play multiple notes together too.
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The history of harmony is related to the history of polyphony.
The lyra of the Greek had different strings according to different modes but their music was monophone (only melodic).
The polyphony has been developed by the monks (organii, bourdon, fauxbourdon). Mind that the church organ has been introduced before the harpsichord and the oud.
Melody and rhythm can exist without harmony. By far the greatest part of the world’s music is nonharmonic. Many highly sophisticated musical styles, such as those of India and China, consist basically of unharmonized melodic lines and their rhythmic organization. In only a few instances of folk and primitive music are simple chords specifically cultivated. Harmony in the Western sense is a comparatively recent invention having a rather limited geographic spread. It arose less than a millennium ago in the music of western Europe and is embraced today only in those musical cultures that trace their origins to that area.
www.britannica.com/art/harmony-music#targetText=The%20organized%20system%20of%20Western,that%20gave%20rise%20to%20polyphony.
Why is Western European music harmonically driven?
Some will answer that harmony is a natural - or even a divine - law that western musician have discovered, others may think it is a cultural concept as a result of musical practice (playing around with tones and overtones)
Western music has never been "harmonically driven".
To get the misinformation about the lute out of the way first: lutes never had frets to impose "precise tuning". The frets were simply loops of gut tied around the neck of the instrument and were intended to be moveable at will by the performer
They were simply playing aids, when the number of strings increased from 3 on the earliest ouds up to as many as 12 on a lute.
The article itself says the lute was largely a melodic instrument, until a playing style that allowed polyphony (not harmony) was developed. "Strumming chords" on a lute was never the basic playing technique.
The theoretical notion of "chords" and "chord progressions" was very late on the scene in western music. Originally it was simply a convenient shorthand for common polyphonic voice-leading patterns. Later, some theorists forgot its origins and started to use it to "explain" things which it can't.
You only have to look at the complexity of Jazz chord notation to see the disconnect between the attempt to describe something in terms of "chords" and explain what it really going on, which is often quite simple, once you get past all the magical incantations like "C7#5b9" and "tritone substitutions" and see what the voice leading - i.e. the polyphony, not the harmony - is doing.
But musical rabbits have colonized this rabbit hole to such an extent that the misguided idea of teaching "harmony" based on "chords" isn't going to disappear any time soon - and it has the unfortunate attraction that it allows people to write unimaginative music, which requires mininal attention from the listener, with very little training or intellectual effort.
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